CATH ALEXANDRINE DANNESKIOLD-SAMSØE GALLERY

Cath Alexandrine Danneskiold-Samsøe Gallery‘Quo Vadis?’16. November, 2012 - 30. January, 2013‘Quo Vadis? is a group exhibition with paintings by three internationally distinguished artists: Luo Mingjun (China), Renato Mambor (Italy)og Berit Heggenhougen-Jensen (DK). With this exhibition Luo Mingjun’s and Renato Mambor’s art is presented for the first time inDenmark.Luo Mingjun (b. 1963, China) has lived in Switzerland for more than 20 years after completing her academic education in China. MingjunLuo finds herself torn between two contrasting cultures, and turns this initial dilemma into a virtue. As though formed of the finest dust andaccumulated on the void of the canvas – thus the impression awakened by Luo Mingjun’s pictorial universes. Vague scenes and momentsdrawn from everyday life are schematically captured; they then display themselves to the viewer’s eyes, begin to come to life in theviewer’s imagination and elaborate into little stories.Through art, traces of memory and recollections of a former life, now renounced, become a constant companion and create a bridgebetween the two cultures. Her interaction with self-images and projected images, with people in her daily life, with the native and theforeign have become of central importance to the Chinese artist. Mingjun’s search for identities – within a life between two worlds thatcould not be more different – is always reflected in her work.Renato Mambor (b. 1936, Italy), the Roman artist is one of the most significant contemporary artists in Italy, and one of the first artistswho extensively experimented with different artistic languages such as performance-art, cinema, installations, theatre and photography.Mambor is one of the most eminent pop art representatives in Italy. Mambor depicts people without any faces but as lonely outlines,making them into the stars of his paintings and sculptures.The exhibited works, invite the viewer to a new experience and spiritual adventure connecting faraway worlds, discharging fake certainties,and opening up ways into the apparently smooth and continuous surface of reality. Mambor breaks the frame, a limit which separates artfrom life, guaranteeing abstract and separate integrity of the artwork.Since 1956, Mambor has exhibited in many collective and solo shows around the world, among others, at the Institute of Contemporary Artin Boston, The National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome, as well as at the 45th, 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales.Berit Heggenhougen-Jensen (b. 1956 , Denmark) graduated from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and has receivedseveral important scholarships throughout her career.With an ironic, sophisticated and distorted aesthetic, Heggenhougen-Jensen confronts the viewer to reconsider the surrounding worldcontra the inner conceptions. The two exhibited oil-paintings, were created in 2011 as an extension to her famous series ‘The Name andits Place’, which was exhibited at Randers Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2009.‘The Name and its Place’ series consider Heggenhougen-Jensen’s identity, and interprets elements of her background. With these twopaintings, Heggenhougen-Jensen invites us to analyze the relationship between the known and the unknown. By inscriptions on the twosidedribbon of a ‘Mobius Strip’ Heggenhougen-Jensen makes the statement that the unknown controls the known. Berit Heggenhougen-Jensen lives and works both in Denmark and France.The ‘Quo Vadis?’ exhibition is on view November 16, 2012 - January 30, 2013For more information and images, please visit www.cdsart.com